Birth of Israel

Filmmaker Raneen Geries receives death threats for showing the Palestinian view of the events of 1948.

When Raneen Geries, a Palestinian woman, arrived at Tel Aviv University to study for a degree in social work, most of the students on her course were Jewish. As conversations frequently touched on family history, she realised how little she knew of her own.

Sixty years on, the shock of Israel’s foundation is still impacting on Christian, Muslim and Jewish thought

From time to time, certain events “shock” history, bring about a rupture in continuity, and throw the future on to a radically new trajectory. This event can be short or stretch over generations, random and accidental or built into the very dynamics of historic processes, sometimes taking the form of an extraordinary person and other times an aggregation of events.